Irving Kristol, RIP

To my knowledge, the late Irving Kristol was the only self-admitted
neoconservative in existence. With his death, at the age of 89, does this mean
the species is extinct? Far from it. In spite of the odd tendency of neoconservatives
to deny
their ideological heritage, there is no escaping it. The title of Kristol’s
1999 book pinpoints the problem: Neoconservatism:
The Autobiography of an Idea.

Neoconservatism, the successful promotion of which Kristol devoted a good
part of his life to, is biography at least as much as ideology. It is the story
of the so-called New
York intellectuals, who spent their misbegotten youth as Trotskyists, penning
furious polemics against U.S. imperialism, but mostly against each other –
and some of whom, including the ex-Trotskyist Kristol, wound up in
the pay of the CIA, writing for Encounter and its French and Italian
equivalents. (For a fascinating account of the neocon-CIA convergence, see
Christopher Lasch’s essay on the Congress
of Cultural Freedom, a CIA
front that nurtured Kristol in the early days of the Cold War.)

In his 1977 essay, "Memoirs
of a Trotskyist," Kristol describes the denizens of Alcove No. 1 at
New York’s City College – the favorite hangout of the anti-Stalinist leftists
on campus, including Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Nathan
Glazer, and, indeed, an entire generation of social scientists who later became
prominent in academia. Here was the birthplace what we know today as the neoconservative
movement, an intellectual tendency in modern American politics that has had
an outsized impact on the nation, especially our foreign policy.

The intellectual odyssey of the neoconservatives is too well-known to go into
here at length: the story has been told, especially by the
participants, time and again. They even made a
movie out of it, in which Kristol played a starring role. As a dedicated
Trotskyist on the eve of World War II, young Kristol was caught up in the internecine
feuds that consumed the movement and ultimately ripped it into two then three
factions. The question was how to respond to the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the
occupation of Europe by the twin totalitarian powers. The side Kristol chose
propelled him on an intellectual journey, along with his friends and cohorts,
that would take him to the heights of power in the inner councils of the very
capitalist class he was once pledged to overthrow.

The debate that broke out in the Socialist
Workers Party, the main Trotskyist group in the U.S. at the time, pitted
the "orthodox" Trotskyists, led by Trotsky and James
P. Cannon – who considered the Soviet Union a "workers state,"
because property was collectivized – against the revisionists, led by Max
Shachtman and James
Burnham, who held that the USSR had morphed into "bureaucratic collectivism,"
a new form of class society based on collectivized property forms, and was no
longer worth defending. The movement split, with the Shachtmanite minority going
its own way. Kristol went with them, and this was just the beginning of multiple
defections.

A few months after the setting up of Shachtman’s group, the Workers Party,
Burnham, a professor of philosophy at New York University, resigned. He was
well on his way to repudiating Marxism altogether. Burnham took a few party
members with him, as was usual in these splits, among them Kristol, who became
the editor of the "theoretical journal" of the "Shermanites,"
who described themselves as "revolutionary anti-Bolsheviks." In the
pages of Enquiry, Kristol attacked Sidney Hook for his pro-war stance,
yet Professor Hook was just ahead of his time. Soon enough, Kristol and the
rest of the Alcove No. 1 gang would follow Hook down the same path, not merely
reconciling themselves to what they used to denounce as "imperialism,"
but becoming its most
fervent cheerleaders.

In his "Memoirs" essay, Kristol explicitly gives thanks for the training
provided by the Trotskyist movement as the ideal school for an intellectual
entrepreneur such as himself. The scholasticism, the organizational discipline,
the single-minded devotion to ideas as weapons of combat: all were good preparation
for the task that lay ahead of him, which was nothing less than taking over
the conservative
movement and the Republican
Party – and finally, with the election of George W. Bush, taking the
White House.

Kristol became known as the "godfather"
of neoconservatism, and for a very good reason. He was the quintessential organizer
and spark plug of the movement, which took on various organizational forms over
the years, and which he best summed up as a "persuasion."
The autobiographical details of the various neoconservative intellectuals vary
with temperament and circumstance: James Burnham went to work for the CIA and
later signed on at National
Review, along with several other ex-Communists of one sort or another.
Others stayed on the Left but tempered their former radicalism with an emphasis
on anti-Stalinism. Shachtman, for example, wound up supporting the Vietnam War
while remaining faithful to the doctrine of socialism. His followers found their
champion in Sen. Henry
"Scoop" Jackson, whose centrist liberalism on domestic issues
and ferocious militarism perfectly embodied the ideological
parameters of the neoconservative persuasion. Jackson’s
aides – Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliott Abrams – became the core
group that would later have an outsized influence on the course
of American foreign policy.

These two tendencies, however, soon met up and reemerged as the Cold War progressed
into semi-hotness. The neoconservative movement has always been focused on foreign
policy, although Kristol’s journal, The
Public Interest, was concerned with domestic policy, seeking to ameliorate
the rampant liberalism of the Great Society with a dose of hard-headed realism.
The main goal of the neoconservatives during the Cold War era was the elimination,
by military means, of their old nemeses,
the Stalinists.

Kristol’s role in this was to provide the organizational and – more importantly
– the financial framework for the nascent neoconservative ascendancy on the
Right. He somehow managed to persuade
the old conservative money – the heirs of fortunes that had once supported the
"isolationist" America First Committee and opposed the "reforms"
of the New Deal tooth and nail – to modify its opposition to the welfare-warfare
state, accepting "two
cheers for capitalism" instead of three and completely abandoning the
old right-wing anti-interventionism of Robert
A. Taft and the America Firsters for the Burnhamite vision of a new world
war, as outlined in the Fifties tome The
Struggle for the World, which advocated a nuclear first strike on the
Soviet Union.

This Strangelovian mindset permeated neoconservative circles in the Cold War
years, but the collapse of the Soviet Union took them by surprise. At first,
they excoriated Ronald Reagan, their
former hero, for welcoming Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to make concessions:
the whole thing was a trap, they said, and the Soviets would soon resume their
dastardly ways. When the Soviet empire collapsed, it left
a void at the center of a movement that was, in very large part, autobiographical.
All these embittered ex-commies and renegade Trotskyists had nothing to direct
their considerable ire at, and the post-Soviet era saw them largely dormant.
Kristol and Co. kept busy, however, filling the rather large intellectual vacuum
that constituted the "mainstream" conservative movement and kicking
William F. Buckley upstairs at his own magazine, where he descended from time
to time to utter an irrelevant homily.

At this point, the neocons held the organizational and financial reins of the
American Right in their hands, and by the time George W. Bush was on his way
to the White House, they had managed to inveigle themselves into the inner
councils of the administration’s foreign policy team. They arrived with
a firm commitment to a vastly increased military budget and an expansive foreign
policy of "democracy-promotion" – by force of arms if need be. They
were perfectly
positioned, when the 9/11 terrorist attacked occurred, to take full advantage
of the power persistence and providence had delivered into their hands. Their
agenda had been set out years ago by Kristol’s son, William, in an essay co-authored
with Robert Kagan, "Toward
a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," in which they summed up the goal of
U.S. foreign policy in a single evocative phrase: "benevolent global hegemony."
9/11 provided the perfect context in which to launch a war to implement the
neoconservative dream of world conquest. The results are all around us – in
Iraq,
in Afghanistan,
in Pakistan,
and beyond.

It’s funny, but to describe someone as a neoconservative is practically considered
a hate
crime in certain quarters – in neoconservative quarters, that is. The reason
is that many of the original neocons were Jewish, and one major doctrinal pillar
of the persuasion is fealty
to Israel and its perceived interests. To call out the neocons, to even
describe them as such, is therefore evidence of "anti-Semitism," as
Jonah Goldberg once complained.
Of course, now that conservatives are complaining that all opposition to President
Obama’s policies is being caricatured as "racist," the neocons can
hardly take this tack.

In any case, the lasting legacy of Irving Kristol is that he was instrumental
in turning the conservative movement away from its radical
anti-statism and toward an almost exclusive concentration on the moral imperative
of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy. His followers and epigones,
who carry on the work in his wake, are the warmongers at the Weekly Standard
and the Limbaugh-Hannity know-nothing Right, which sees every recognition of
the limitations of American power – government power – as a "betrayal."
This is surely a most unconservative – even anti-conservative – vision, a form
of radicalism that resembles nothing so much as Trotskyism-turned-inside-out.

One of the big differences between Stalin and Trotsky was the former’s conception
of "socialism
in one country" – the idea that communism could survive only in the
Soviet Union and its satellites, without inciting a world revolution. Trotsky,
sticking to the orthodox Marxist-Leninist position, held that a world revolution
was imperative, or else the Soviet Union was doomed to fail, encircled as it
was by the hostile, capitalist West.

What the neocons did was simply switch allegiances from the old Soviet Union
to the United States, taking their hotheaded Trotskyist temperament with them
– and finally aspiring to lead a world revolution with the United States government
at its head. When George W. Bush announced the launching of what he called a
"global
democratic revolution," he was merely echoing
the neo-Trotskyist rhetoric of his closest advisers and the intellectual movement
from which they sprang.

The prospects of that revolution grow dimmer by the day, but the idea lives
on, as does neoconservatism. In the age of Obama, it takes on new forms – as
I explained in my last column – but the essence remains the same: war, war,
and yet more war, as far as the eye can see. That, in brief, is the program
of the neoconservatives, and Kristol’s legacy for the ages.